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Category: science kits

Monday, 16 April 2012

07:43 – It’s amazing what a difference a tiny little thing like a comma can make. I saw the following on Wikipedia last night:

1520 – Citizens of Toledo, Castile, who were opposed to the rule of the foreign-born Charles V, rose up in revolt when the royal government attempted to unseat radical city councilors.

I think what they meant to say was:

1520 – Citizens of Toledo, Castile who were opposed to the rule of the foreign-born Charles V rose up in revolt when the royal government attempted to unseat radical city councilors.

I was reminded of Oscar Wilde: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” Non-writers think he was kidding; writers know he wasn’t.

With the taxes finished, I’m back to working heads-down on the forensics book. Yesterday, though, I spent some time putting together a basic web site for the science kits. As of now, all I have is landing pages for the chemistry kit and the biology kit. I need more than that, ideally before the biology book hits the bookstores.

13:02 – Here’s irony. Barbara and I have been watching Heartland on Netflix streaming. They have the first two series: 13 episodes in series 1 and 18 in series 2. Series 3 and series 4 are out on DVD, and series 5 is currently running. (Netflix Canada streaming has series 1 through 4, but I won’t complain too much since it’s a CBC program and Canadians generally get screwed on Netflix streaming anyway.)

So, a few minutes ago, I decided screw it. I’d just upgrade our Netflix account from streaming-only to streaming + one DVD at a time. The change took effect immediately, and I headed over to my disc queue to add Heartland series 3 and 4. The only problem was, Netflix doesn’t have series 3 and 4 on DVD. They don’t even have series 2. Incredibly, they don’t even have all of series 1. They have, on DVD, just the first half of series 1. Geez.

Of course, I could just torrent down series 3 and 4 and even series 5 through the latest episode that’s run. But that’s a pain in the petunia, so (much though I hate the idea) I may actually buy the DVDs for series 3 and 4, or at least series 3. I see that Amazon sells those two seasons for $27 and $40 each.

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Saturday, 14 April 2012

09:11 – Laundry and science kit stuff for me today. Barbara has yard work. With taxes out of the way, I can get back to re-writing the forensics book.

Our target date for biology kit availability was 18 April, which we’ll meet. I don’t expect to start getting many biology kits orders until maybe a week or two after the book hits the stores, which is late this month or early next. We have 30 biology kits in stock, and the components in inventory we need to build another 30 in a couple of hours. We also have most of what we need to build 30 more chemistry kits. All we lack is a few of the bottled chemicals, and we’ll be filling, labeling, and sealing the last group of those this weekend.

I talked to our letter carrier the other day. Until now, the most I’ve been shipping is one or two kits a day. I told him that with the new book hitting the stores, that number might increase significantly on some days, and asked if that would be a problem for him. He asked how many, and I told him I didn’t really know but it might be five or ten kits on a heavy day and maybe more than that on a very heavy day. He said it’d be no problem at all. We’re near the end of his route, so his truck is normally almost empty when he delivers our mail. He said that if there wasn’t room in his truck he’d take what he could and come back to get the rest or, if necessary, call in to the post office and have them send out an empty truck.

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Monday, 9 April 2012

07:55 – I start work on our federal and state incomes taxes today. As far as I can see, our LLC makes zero difference to how I’ll do the taxes. The revenue and expenses for the corporation go directly to Schedule C on the federal return, just as they did when I was operating as a sole proprietor. And the state return simply uses figures plugged in from the federal return, as always.

Speaking of the state return, I finally took some time yesterday to get my new Epson V300 scanner up and working. There was no prayer of that happening on my main office system, which is running Ubuntu 9.04 (!). So I took the scanner back to Barbara’s office and connected it to her system, which is running a more recent Ubuntu. Epson supplies Linux drivers, but the installation wasn’t completely straightforward. I had to install an older version of one of the support files manually, after which the scanner was immediately recognized by xSane. I did a test scan, and everything appears to be working normally.

What motivated me to finally get the scanner running is that the stupid North Carolina PDF tax forms can be filled out and printed with Adobe Reader, but they can’t be saved. How stupid is that? So, my choices were to just print an extra copy of the completed return for our records or to get the scanner working. Either that, or to what I’ve done in a couple prior years when I didn’t have a working scanner: put the completed forms on the floor and shoot images of them with a digital camera.

Barbara tried to give Colin a bath yesterday. As usual, she stripped down and got in the downstairs shower and then I brought Colin into the bathroom. The last time, he was pretty good about getting into the shower with her and seemed resigned to being bathed. This time, he simply refused to get in the shower. He was terrified. He actually snapped at Barbara. I could feel him shivering in terror. So we bagged it. With the weather getting warmer, it’s not a big deal. Barbara will wash him outdoors with the hose at the next opportunity.

We’re starting to get queries about the biology kits, which will start shipping next week. Other than the supplemental DVD included with each kit, we have the first batch of 30 kits made up and ready to go, with components for 30 more in the on-deck circle. We hope that’ll be enough at least to buffer the initial flood of orders when the book hits the stores, but of course we’re prepared to order in components for and assemble a lot more kits quickly if the initial flood of orders is larger than expected. We’re also in the process of making up 30 more chemistry kits, and we’ve penciled in some time in a couple of months to begin assembling forensics kits. Obviously, we’re going to be busy for the next few months.

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Monday, 2 April 2012

07:49 – It’s that time again. Time to start thinking about doing tax returns. That means I’ll be in a bad mood for the next couple of weeks. I’ll accumulate forms and get the paperwork together this week and work on the taxes this coming weekend.

Work on the forensics book continues, as does work on assembling a new batch of chemistry kits.

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Sunday, 1 April 2012

08:06 – It’s official. In yesterday’s mail, the contract showed up for our next book, The Illustrated Guide to Homeopathy Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture. We hope to have it in print before the end of this year.

As always, we’ll be putting together a custom kit to go with the book. That kit will include volumetric glassware, a small rubber mallet, and the other equipment needed to make up homeopathic remedies, along with the dozens of tinctures and extracts necessary to make up literally hundreds of different totally ineffective homeopathic “drugs”. Because homeopathy teaches that the more dilute a solution is the more potent it is, we’ve decided to simplify matters by pre-diluting the tinctures and extracts so that the kit contains only the most potent raw materials. In other words, all of the bottles will contain only pure distilled water, without so much as even a single molecule of their supposed contents.

This one should be a goldmine.

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Saturday, 31 March 2012

09:18 – I’m taking a day off writing today to get some work done on the new batch of chemistry kits.

11:17 – Barbara says it’s time to replace the deck. I’m sure she’s right, since the deck was built with the house in 1968 with pressure-treated wood, and hasn’t had much maintenance since then. Yesterday, one of the sides fell off. Hmmm.

So, after Tax Day, I’m going to start researching options. We already know we don’t want pressure-treated wood. We want something that’s as low-maintenance as possible, like vinyl or composite. We also know that we don’t want or need a new deck as large as the old one. We seldom entertain, and when we do it’s usually just one or at most two other couples. We need room for a gas grill, a small table, and four to six chairs. Barbara and I just went out with the tape measure, and we decided a deck 13 or 14 feet (~ 4 meters) by 8 or 9 feet (~ 2.5 meters) would suffice.

I do want to have room for one special feature: a pivoting trap door in the floor above a tank of piranha, with a squirrel feeder positioned such that a squirrel would have to step on the pivoting trap door to reach the feeder. We have squirrels year-round, so the piranha starving to death won’t be an issue.

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Friday, 30 March 2012

08:03 – The EU must think everyone else is stupid. Fekter announced today that the EU is boosting its “firewall” to $1 trillion+. The problem is, that’s a complete lie. The EU hasn’t boosted anything. The size of the “firewall” hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that the EU is now using accounting smoke-and-mirrors to make its nominal €500 billion look like €800 billion. They even added in the €110 billion from the first Greek bailout. All this in an attempt to convince markets that a real firewall exists and, more importantly, to convince the IMF (read, the US) to contribute an additional $1 trillion to bailing out the euro. Fortunately, the G20 in general and the US in particular aren’t going to fall for this cynical attempt to shift EU debts onto other countries’ taxpayers. And the sad truth is that that “€500 billion” fund actually has maybe 1% of that amount available. The remainder is essentially IOUs, promises to pay by countries that, other than Germany and Finland, can’t pay their own bills. This will not end well.

Work on the forensics book continues, as does work on a new batch of chemistry kits.

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Wednesday, 28 March 2012

08:10 – More information is starting to come to light about the Trayvon Martin shooting. The media has been portraying this as a big, armed, white, fascist vigilante shooting down a small black boy armed only with a bag of snacks who was minding his own business. But according to the police report, things were a bit different than the way the media has been painting it. First, the community where the shooting occurred is one of the most crime-ridden and dangerous places in America. Second, that “little boy” was 6’3″ tall. Third, several eyewitnesses told police the same story: that Martin punched Zimmerman, who is actually Hispanic, to the ground, jumped on him, and started beating Zimmerman’s head against the sidewalk. In light of that, it’s not surprising that the cops didn’t charge Zimmerman. It sounds to me like they should have given him a community service medal.

We made a good start yesterday on another batch of 30 chemistry kits. We’re down to less than a dozen in inventory. This is the slowest time of year but that’s still uncomfortably low.

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Tuesday, 27 March 2012

08:43 – Barbara had a carry-over vacation day that she had to take or lose, so she’s taking it today. She’s doing some farming work out in the yard and we’ll work on building more chemistry kits later.

I must admit that I’m not following the ObamaCare thing closely, figuring that it’s all politics and it’ll work out however the politicians decide it’ll work out. Whichever way it works out, I suspect a lot of people are going to be unhappy, including those who think they’ll be happy with one outcome or another. I suspect, no matter how the individual mandate thing unfolds, a lot of people who now have insurance through their jobs are going to find that they no longer do. But the real killer is going to be the pre-existing conditions thing. Forcing insurers to cover pre-existing conditions means that what they’re selling is no longer insurance by any reasonable definition. And, I will point out something that I’ve seen no one else point out: age is a pre-existing condition. Wait for the lawsuits. And the physicians and insurers declaring bankruptcy. Family-care physicians are hanging on by their fingernails right now. ObamaCare is going to put a lot more of them out of business.

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Monday, 26 March 2012

08:06 – It’s official. We’re now shipping the BK01 biology kits.

For the next two months, I’ll be working heads-down on the re-write of the forensic science book and prototyping the forensic science kit. The goal is to finish the book in May and have the book and kits available in August, so there’s a lot to be done between now and then.

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